Movie Review: Brooklyn’s Finest

Reviewed by Ryan M. Eft

In my review of this week’s Alice in Wonderland, I commented on the need for every movie to devolve into action spectacle. Brooklyn’s Finest is a poster child for that affliction. It gives us about an hour and a half or so of fascinating character study, then jumps the rails for a half hour shootout.   

Who is shooting at who and why I won’t reveal, primarily because the characters are far more interesting before the bullets fly. Director Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington gave us a fascinating portrayal of a cop gone completely rotten in Training Day. Here, he gives us three interesting cops. Eddie (Richard Gere) is seven days away from ending 22 years on the beat. His advice to a naïve rookie who thinks he is a superhero? “You’ve got twenty years of days.” He is no hero cop; cliché it may be, but on the beat he has being a hero gets you dead. Sal (Ethan Hawke) is initially presented as a corrupt bad-ass, but is gradually revealed as a father whose life has piled up on him. He’s got more kids than he can feed, two more on the way and a house full of wood mold. Tango (Don Cheadle) is an undercover narcotics officer who just wants out; this is made more complicated since one of his targets saved his life.

All of this could have been cliché, but Fuqua has an eye for characters. Gere doesn’t growl or snarl the way some veteran cops in movies do. He is possessed of the kind of calm that only comes from having spent years looking into the lion’s maw, and concluding you can’t save the world by putting on a badge. He has what amounts to a paid relationship with a hooker (Shannon Kane); she hides her own complexities, and their interactions could have been the fuel for a separate film.

The other two men interact more distantly with their non-cop lives. Cheadle, who is always talented, plays Tango as a man who is cut off from his own life and tries to make up for it by building one with the sort of people he is supposed to be hunting. Hawke brings to Sal a smoldering impatience that causes him to miss what is right in front of him, hoping for the proverbial greener grass. The film gives the sense that these are three men on the same path, at different points and having made somewhat different decisions along the way. There are some strong back-up performances as well. Wesley Snipes is Tango’s drug-dealing friend, in a performance that suggests there is a lot more going on under his hood than under those of his associates. Will Patton plays the kind of go-between deal maker he manages so well, while Ellen Barkin is one of those pointy-toothed bureaucratic vipers who seem designed to be hated. This is the first film written by Michael C. Martin, and I certainly hope he gets more of these opportunities.

All of those elements are unfortunately dispersed in the last half an hour in favor of a prolonged gun battle. Here the rational, reality-grounded personalities become either too good or too evil: only Tango’s transformation is believable. The entire sequence adds almost nothing to the story being told; the film could have ended earlier and been better for it. As it is, we have a cop movie that is not great, but manages good. I suppose even that is pretty hard to come by these days.